Maggie Cheung comes 'Clean'

Somehow, it's difficult to imagine that Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) is a real person. The almost celestial poise she displays in her best-known movies -- Wong Kar-wai's (王家衛) In the Mood for Love and the historical epic Hero -- have given her the kind of mystique that once surrounded the stars of Hollywood's golden age. It helps that both these films were heavily stylized period pieces -- in the former, she played an elegantly repressed and impossibly well-attired 1960s housewife; in the latter, a tragically noble, gravity-defying swordswoman -- but even when she played "herself" in the French art movie Irma Vep, she slinked around Parisian rooftops in a skintight catsuit in a way no ordinary mortal would.

From these performances, it would be easy to picture her as an impregnable fortress of cosmopolitan cool. In reality, she is chatty, casual and candid, and she used to live in unremarkable West Wycombe, in southeast England. When we speak, Cheung she starts reminiscing about the pharmacist and supermarket on her former high street, and the drudgery of life in xenophobic 1970s suburban Britain -- a Britain where "ching chong Chinaman" was a perfectly acceptable insult.

In her latest movie, Clean, she's a lot more like a real person than in her period roles, despite the fact she plays the junkie wife of a dead Canadian rock star. Her character undergoes a harrowing journey of despair, ostracism, drug withdrawal and dispossession, but for the first time, Cheung also gets to do things she might do in real life, such as wearing contemporary clothes, speaking English (and French and Cantonese), playing pool and singing rock tunes. She even looks vaguely dishevelled at times.

"It was so liberating," she says. "The lady would put some dark circles under my eyes, make my skin look a little dry, give me some chapped lips and I was ready! It's quite the opposite of In the Mood for Love, where it was literally four hours' hair and one of make-up every day. I lost half my hair through all the brushing and teasing. That was such a pain in the arse."

As if to prove the point, she looks almost the same in the flesh as she does in Clean, minus the chapped lips. Even so, aspects of Cheung's life still read more like movie fiction than everyday reality -- such as the fact that she and Clean's director, Olivier Assayas, signed their divorce papers on set.

It's no surprise Cheung won best actress at last year's Cannes film festival: Assayas wrote the film specifically for her, and it's almost a showcase for her talents. "I guess he must have seen me in those kinds of situations," she says. "When I read the script, I thought: that's very similar to who I am. And when you're writing for a person, I guess you put in all the things she likes to do or wants to do, or can relate to. Even playing pool is something that he knows I love."

In light of their separation, though, the Cannes victory was bittersweet: "It made us think we were right to work together, but it seemed from the outside, and Olivier actually mentioned it, which I could kill him for, that it was a present from my ex-husband. For me that prevented me from feeling truly aesthetically happy about it. I don't really want a film as a present, you can get me a diamond ring."

"But it's almost symbolic how we started out with a film and then finished with one. It's something beautiful between us, even if there is no more marriage."